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Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Wedding Wednesday ~ Holländer and Händler in 1909

As I mentioned in an earlier post about finding birth records for Lena's siblings, civil registration started in Hungary in October 1895. These civil registration records can be found at FamilySearch.org's Collection List, under Hungary, Civil Registration, 1895-1980, where at this time, there are over 5.5 million unindexed images. This just means that you have to find the community you want and search screen by screen, like going through a microfilm roll.

I have been working my way through the (unindexed and mis-titled) images for Bonyhád, Tolna, Hungary, looking for any record with the surname Holländer. I have found a few Holländer birth and death records, but I really wanted to find the marriage record for my husband's paternal grandparents.

I knew that Lina Holländer and Josef Handler had married around 1908-1909 because their oldest son was born in January 1910, Josef immigrated to America in April 1910, and Lina and her son immigrated in May 1911. See my post about passenger lists for these details and how much I learned.

Jozsef Händler, (izr. = Jewish), born August 24, 1884 in Ilok (Hungary) married Lina Holländer (izr. = Jewish), born September 5, 1889 in Bonyhád. It looks like his occupation is Fuvaros, which Google Translate tells me is "Carter" and his parents' names are Aron and Szah (?) Händler. Lina's parents' names are Samuel Holländer and Anna Honevald, which I already knew from the birth records for her and her siblings. The names in the following column are names of the two witnesses, Antal Engelmann and Salamon Heller, both of Bonyhád.

Handwritten records are a challenge. The items here that I'm unclear on are:

Jozsef's occupation: does this look like fuvaros? If so, is "carter" an accurate translation?

What is the word above Aron Handler's name? I wonder if it means "the late" Aron Handler and he was no longer living? It is believed that Joseph's and Lena's oldest child, Arthur, was named after this grandfather. Update (3/24/2012): I found another, more legible, instance of this word: "néhai", and yes, it does translate to "late" as in he was deceased at the time of his son's marriage.

What is Jozsef's mother's name? My first instinct was Leah, but on closer look and comparing letters with others on the page, the first letter is not "L" and the second letter looks like "z" not "e". The 1911 passenger list has a Roza Handler so perhaps this is a variation on the "zah" sound of the name? Update (3/25/2012): Thank you to a reader from Jerusalem with generations of ancestors in Hőgyész, Tolna, Hungary, who emailed me to let me know that she reads this as Szoli which is an equivalent of Sara.

All in all, I am pretty excited to have found this record. I will still work my way through these records, looking for Hollanders to try to piece together Lina's family, who are believed to have died in the Holocaust, as there were no more letters after World War II. To find these cousins, I need to find out who her sisters married.

Wedding Wednesday is a daily blogging prompt from Geneabloggers, the genealogy community's resource for blogging. It is used by many genealogy bloggers to help them tell stories of their ancestors.